By Zihna Gordon
When I was 16 my family moved to a new town and a new denomination. The national leadership of the United Church of Christ had just informed local congregations that by their polity, the issue of whether each church identified themselves as “open and affirming” was each church’s business to decide.
Feeling pressure to self-define, our church reluctantly waded into the conversation. It was a tense, hot time, rife with long meetings, snapping tempers and nasty gossip. Pews emptied week by week of friends from both sides of the discussion.
In the end, the church chose not to adopt that designation. We’d found our answer but halved our population. Two-thirds of our ministers had quit. And I had learned: the process engaged in a demanding discussion is every bit as important as the conclusion.
The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and Mercer University are planning a critical conversation for a critical time. In the face of cultural realities such as increasing divorce, cohabitation and committed same-gender relationships, A [Baptist] Conversation on Sexuality and Covenant will provide space to consider the traditional Baptist sexual ethic: Sexual expression is a sacred gift from God that is reserved for the lifetime marriage covenant between one man and one woman…
I am proud of us for this courage. It is right for Christians to engage the culture and offer it the best we know of how to be whole as humans. To withdraw when something is shifting is to abdicate our salt-and-light identity, and to show our faith principles irrelevant to our time.
Yet these are dangerous waters. Addressing cultural shifts in the form of civil and women’s rights has decimated denominations in the past, and those groups that have engaged discussion about LGBTQ issues have likewise faced their own conflict and rifts. It is reasonable to enter this discourse with fear and trembling. Yet we possess one incredibly powerful resource that other groups lack: We are Baptist.
In The Baptist Identity: Four Fragile Freedoms, Walter Shurden gives four ideals from Baptist history than can orient us for this discussion and give us tools to engage it with courage, wisdom and grace.
Bible Freedom is the right and responsibility of every believer to study the scriptures herself, with the best scholarship available, free before the leading of God. For this discussion, that will mean careful consideration of both the passages that have helped Baptists form our sexual ethic and those that show us how to treat people who are different from us.
Soul Freedom is the right and responsibility of each person to interact with God free of imposition by creed, clergy or government. As non-creedal people, what marks a true Baptist is not so much what he believes, but how that position was reached. One’s personal searching with God is absolutely paramount, and room must be left by each of us for the possibility of a surprise.
Church Freedom is the right and responsibility of each church body to discern and live out its own calling. We may be drawn to different positions in this discussion. We’re not meant to be transplanted copies of each other, nor should differences keep us from fellowship or working together toward common goals.
Religious Freedom is the right and responsibility of each believer to maintain distinct relationships to spiritual and civic realms. The Baptist movement arose out of an abusive state-imposed church system; sometimes Christ and Caesar are at odds. Technically, it would be very Baptist for a body to maintain a neutral position toward the government’s definition of marriage as they determine their position.
In addition to these beautiful ideals, CBF Baptists have one final asset from history: memory of a time the practices were not engaged. We carry the scars of having lost an organization we love because we were outvoted. We know how it feels to not be heard through an agenda, to be outcast from a group that has no authoritarian Bible interpretation, no authority over the individual believer or local congregation, no creed.
How we treat each other now could redeem the CBF experience by refusing to do as we were taught. We can break the cycle of violence, and model a different way.